Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

History Is Relatives

By JoAnne Ruvoli
March 9, 2009

Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2007) takes readers on a complex journey through the history of the 20th Century in search of her great-grandfather's life story. Once she discovers information about Long Tack Sam, her quest becomes one to not only uncover more details, but also to find the reasons why such an important performer was forgotten.

Adapted from Fleming's award-winning documentary film of the same name, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam was nominated for two Eisner Awards in 2008, and has won several accolades in the field of young adult literature. Fleming achieves a fascinating perspective on world history through the depiction of the experiences of one transnational family.

The memoir collects and reproduces photographs, screen captures from her film, playbills, newspaper clippings, posters and advertisements from around the world; Fleming also documents the people who helped in her search. A narrator named Stickgirl serves as master of ceremonies and often comments on the wide-ranging material. Ann Marie herself appears separately as a character in screen captures, as well as in drawings. Fleming draws Stickgirl more abstractly than her Ann Marie character and uses both to comment on Ann Marie's struggles. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes:

When you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face — you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon — you see yourself.

Applying McCloud's theory, Fleming is able to make Stickgirl's journey and process of discovery universally appealing through the narrator's simple iconic quality; her search for roots and identity relate to our own. At the same time Fleming highlights the authentic details of Long Tack Sam's exceptional life by rendering him in realistically-reproduced photographs and artifacts. In this combination of icon and realism, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam becomes both a universal story of identity construction and a portrait of the unique life lived by Long Tack Sam and his family. By framing Long Tack Sam's story with Stickgirl, the search for the past becomes the reader's journey too. As Fleming navigates with the Ann Marie character through world wars, economic depressions and boom times by tracing Sam's journey, you find yourself charting your family's history as well. To assist you, Fleming provides a running timeline of historical and cultural events in the margins of the text.

With some digging into Magician archives such as the Jackie Flosso's Magic Shop in New York City and the American Museum of Magic in Marshall Michigan, Fleming discovers that Long Tack Sam's vaudeville success is well documented, but that several different accounts exist as to how he began as a performer. She depicts these accounts in the whimsical style of Golden Age comics which are wonderfully drawn by Julian Lawrence. The choice of a cartoony style works well, since it contrasts with the realism of the archival documents and reinforces the storytelling quality of the accounts. Fleming cannot be sure which of Sam's origin stories is most true, so she has Stickgirl explain the context of where she found the story or what she discovered about why Sam told that version. We all tell stories about our lives for specific purposes or effects, and the conflicting details of each of Sam's stories reveal much about the obstacles he encountered that may have played a role in shaping the stories he told about himself. The Golden Age style adds a mythic or fairy tale quality to these tellings.

Fleming travels all over the world enlisting the help of friends, family, and historians of magic, vaudeville and film. Traveling from Canada to Austria, Hawaii, Australia, China and the United States, she pieces together the threads of Long Tack Sam's life. Born in China, Sam made a fortune performing around the world. He married an Austrian woman named Poldi who manages the vaudevillian acrobatics act which eventually features their two daughters. Fleming locates buildings that Sam used to own, theater backdrops, costumes, and headdresses, as well as the photograph and paper documents she reproduces in the text. And every place she goes, people tell her more stories. Sometimes encountering visa problems similar to those of her great-grandfather, her search follows the same performer circuits that Sam's troupe traveled; later Fleming's film documentary plays at many of the theaters that used to stage these old vaudeville acts.

One twist worth noting is that Fleming ends up making independent films about her Eurasian family, but Sam rejected a film career in early Hollywood for himself and his daughters. His two bi-racial daughters Mina and Nee-sa were considered too beautiful to play Chinese characters. Because of Hollywood's stereotypical portrayals of Chinese as "bandits, opium smokers ... asexual murderers and all-around bad guys," Sam rejected the opportunity to act in movies. Stickgirl explains:

Long Tack Sam had built a career in presenting a beautiful show with beautiful performers, but that's not how people wanted to see Chinese. Sam spent his whole life adjusting to his audience, but now he puts his foot down. He is not going to Hollywood, and neither are his daughters. He was kissing their careers good-bye.

The son forgets what the grandson tries to recover, the old adage goes, and Fleming ultimately determines that her family is spread so far and wide that Sam's story had fallen through the cracks. He didn't stay in China so was forgotten there. He didn't go into films and Hollywood's glamor eclipsed vaudeville's legacy. The reasons why he is forgotten are almost as informative about 20th century culture as Sam's actual story.

With its unique mixture of drawn and photographic images, Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam expands the genre of graphic memoirs and belongs on the shelf next to Bechdel's Fun Home, Spiegelman's MAUS, and Katin's We Are On Our Own. More significantly, this recovery of her family's history spanning the 20th and 21st centuries is an important one, and just one narrative example of how society's perceptions of the transnational experience have changed — and not changed — over time.

http://www.longtacksam.com/ — Official Long Tack Sam Film website
Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin — Publisher's website